Los Angeles Arts District: Galleries, Craft Beer and Industrial Cool

The Arts District is Downtown Los Angeles's most successful urban transformation — a former industrial zone east of the LA River that has become the primary destination for the galleries, restaurants, breweries, and creative businesses that have fuelled Downtown's revival since 2010. The neighbourhood's former cold storage facilities, industrial lofts, and printing plant buildings provide the large, cheap (relatively speaking) spaces that creative industries require, and the proximity to the rest of Downtown's cultural infrastructure — the Broad Museum, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Grand Central Market — has made the Arts District one of the most complete urban neighbourhoods that Los Angeles, a city not historically associated with walkable urban life, has ever produced.

The gallery scene of the Arts District is Los Angeles's most concentrated for contemporary art with urban credibility: the Hauser & Wirth gallery's LA outpost, which includes the Manuela restaurant in a converted flour mill building, is among the most significant gallery openings in Los Angeles in the past decade, establishing the Arts District as a world-class art destination rather than merely an interesting local scene. The surrounding streets contain galleries representing emerging Los Angeles artists whose work reflects the specific cultural conditions of a city shaped by film, fashion, tech, and the Latino and Asian heritage that makes LA's cultural production unlike any other American city's. The Art Walk, held the second Thursday of each month since 2004, has been the district's primary community event — a self-guided gallery crawl that helped establish the neighbourhood before it became a destination in its own right.

The food and beer culture of the Arts District has matured into one of LA's most interesting dining destinations: the Zinc Café & Market, Bestia (nose-to-tail Italian that became one of the city's most influential restaurant openings when it launched in 2012), Bavel (Middle Eastern from the same team), and the craft breweries including the Arts District Brewing Company and Guerrilla Brewing represent different registers of a neighbourhood food scene that has grown from the ground up around the art community rather than being imposed by restaurant groups targeting demographic opportunity. The food hall culture of the Downtown area, including the Grand Central Market five minutes away, integrates the Arts District into a broader dining geography that makes this part of LA one of the most rewarding for extended eating exploration.